Does the newly announced D800 firmware work for you?

photoreddi wrote:Nikon already has something like that in some of their cameras. Down in the lower left part of the viewfinder Nikon's DSLRs have a green dot that lights up as a "now I'm focused properly" indicator. The FX DSLRs that I've used also have two little green triangles, one to the left and one to the right of the green dot. One of them lights up when the camera is not properly focused. If the one to the right is display (this triangle points to the left, towards where the green dot would have appeared), this indicates that what the AF sensor is covering is in front of the focus plane and if the other triangle on the other side of the missing green dot appears, it indicates that the AF sensor is looking at an object that is located behind the focus plane. This is what it looks like in the D700's viewfinder, where this green rangefinder indicator is identified as object #5.

I'm very well aware of this, my suggestion was to replace or supplant the existing function (described above) with the one I had suggested in my previous message.

Sorry to trigger your mild annoyance but there was no way that I or anyone else could have known what you were or weren't aware of, and many people reading this thread might not have known of this similar feature so it was worth mentioning, even if I somehow knew that you were very well aware of the feature.

My own thoughts are that the existing rangefinder triangles should at least have been implemented in all of Nikon's DSLRs except possibly for the entry level models. I also think that some photographers would prefer keeping the rangefinders where they're currently located to keep the optical viewfinders from getting too visually cluttered. A menu option could be used to disable this feature, but it seems better to keep the rangefinders where photographers might not be forced to make that choice if they want the rangefinder indicators but also prefer uncluttered viewfinders.

Also, the AF rectangles are sometimes difficult to see, depending on the kind of subjects that are positioned behind them. This would be the same for the rangefinder indicators (that show back or front focus), but the current location in the bottom left corner doesn't have that problem since the green dot and triangles always stand out against a black background. If Nikon does implement the type of rangefinder that you suggest, I think that it would be much more likely to be used with an EVF, not with an optical viewfinder, because one is more easily implemented with software and the other requires hardware, and probably different versions of the hardware for the different DSLR models.